I think this signals game over in the arms race.
I’ve joined Anthropic
331–340 of 673 posts
Re: I’ve joined Anthropic
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the country, I guess. In Europe, it would definitely not be the norm and I would definitely call previous employers if it was several 2 year stints.
While I absolutely confirm that everything you said is true, it’s interesting that that call would be illegal in many European countries. And in many more you would at best get a „I can confirm this person worked on this position in this timeframe“
Hmm, interesting point, I did not know that. But, aside from that, while they cannot tell you that the candidate would not be ok, I did get hints on what to look out for.
I mean, you always have to take the previous employers' statements with a grain of salt, but if they say they really employed for just that project, it's also good info.
Re: I’ve joined Anthropic
#333He moves around quite a bit. Less than 2 years on average if you take away the longest and shortest jobs. It feels like this is just a celebrity hire to help raise IPO value, and then he'll move again when the tech hits another real-world scaling wall. Expect another short stint (stunt) with Anthropic.
Even if that's true, 2 years is a huge amount of time to make real impact right now. By 2 years, we could have a clear winner of the AGI/ASI race.
Re: I’ve joined Anthropic
#334He moves around quite a bit. Less than 2 years on average if you take away the longest and shortest jobs. It feels like this is just a celebrity hire to help raise IPO value, and then he'll move again when the tech hits another real-world scaling wall. Expect another short stint (stunt) with Anthropic.
rest & vest if he makes it to IPO
I wonder what's his net worth - probably 100M+?
Re: I’ve joined Anthropic
#335Interesting if his educational startup turned out to be less perspective at least with the current gen of llms.
Re: I’ve joined Anthropic
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
i wouldn't be surprised if he just becomes a glorified marketer for anthro. im also going to guess that whatever research he does would be free roam research that primarily serves to market the fact that claude was able to help perform the research. the visible stuff he's been working on has been mostly agent soft skills. off the top of my head is autoresearch and his the wiki knowledge stuff. nothing particularly gr…
I think you are underestimating both the value of both projects (autoresearch and personal wiki) just because they are simple. I see both POCs for continuous learning / optmization on the harness layer, which in my opinion is a very interesting direction. I think Andrej has the experience (and now ressources) to productionize this research into something very interesting. p.s. called it > Karpathy will help launch a…
Those projects are a complete joke. Neither of them were even original, people have been playing around with those ideas for well over a year.
They just became "famous" because Karpathy is effectively an AI celebrity, so he could throw shit at a wall and post it on X and it would get 10k Github stars.
But seriously, people have been using the models to tweak hyperparemeters, or using LLMs to help create a second brain using markdown or json files or 100X other combinations of files, for a long time already.
Re: I’ve joined Anthropic
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
5 years at Tesla is an eternity in the tech world. And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
> And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry. maybe for a fungible CRUD engineer. I think Karpathy is in a different league and I'm certainly surprised to hear this fact. I would expect someone like him to sit within a certain lab for a long time
He's an extraordinarily bright guy. He can get a lot more done in two years than most people, and he can get up to speed with a new organization and a new task and be productive much faster than most people.
My impression with no inside knowledge, but understanding what Elon companies are like, is that he was assigned essentially an impossible task at Tesla and tried his very best, but it could not be done, and he semi-burned out. It makes sense for him to be getting back on the horse now.
The Elon approach to management as I see it is to assign what normally would be totally unreasonable goals to a small group of extremely bright people, and they work their asses off and somehow find a way. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. If it works and the impossible was in fact, just barely possible, you dominate the market, everyone gets rich, and the people see it as the most exciting, intense, and rewarding part of their career. If it doesn't, they get depressed, divorced, and looking for other work. The Elon magic is threading the needle closely enough that a lot of the seemingly impossible things are in fact possible with enough hard work and brainpower, but although Elon is extremely good at this, the nature of the thing is that you can't predict which side you'll wind up on fully accurately.
Re: I’ve joined Anthropic
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not enough to have unique ideas. You need capital, compute, people, distribution, customers… There’s huge appeal to joining a place that has all those things and lets you pursue your unique ideas without worrying about all that.
I'm pretty sure Karpathy can have billions of capital if he wanted to.
Mo money, mo problems. Just let the dude work, he’s not starving and he’s probably enjoying his life not completely wrapped up in the stress that running a company in this market must be.
Re: I’ve joined Anthropic
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
5 years at Tesla is an eternity in the tech world. And 2 years is probably pretty average for the whole tech industry.
Depends on the country, I guess. In Europe, it would definitely not be the norm and I would definitely call previous employers if it was several 2 year stints.
Europe is not a monolith. Lots of short stints is not unusual in London.
Re: I’ve joined Anthropic
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hypothetically you take the leading expert of a field and say "they believe in their own field too much - far more than I do as a layman - and therefore surely must have psychosis." Why should I trust that your assessment is correct? Is it likely to ever be correct in the case of a doctor/mechanical engineer/athlete/economist/whatever? So why do so many people insist that an incredibly intelligent AI researcher has f…
Because we're paying attention? A lot of "smart" people are lost in the AI sauce, grandstanding that they are going to change the very fabric of society. Generally leading experts in other fields are not making the same hyperbolic, self-indulgent, embarrassing statements.
Have you considered that maybe the experts in a field are actually correct about that field?